New Poll!
When you saw the news that CmdrTaco was resigning your first thought was:

1) So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish: 99.99%
2) Some other option
3) Yet another option
4) A fourth option
5) CowboyNeal

Seriously, I think the collective all thought option 1 at the same time.
We all are individuals.
-NS

If fishing is still underway... an invite sent to nosesocks at gmail dot com would be greatly appreciated.

It took me five seconds to remember the New York Times Editorial that cites exactly what you're looking for
NY Times Op Ed

I found the following particularly interesting: "According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes."

As long as you aren't using local-only service, you are no longer paying that tax on your landline:
Wikipedia - Federal Telephone Excise Tax

I found the following article from the New Yorker to provide considerable information about what led up to the charges:
New Yorker: The Secret Sharer

So this announcement from the government advising people to purchase a new Windows Operating System occurs only days after Microsoft's stock was impacted due to poor Operating System sales
Microsoft Stock news

"Frightening expansion of government" is the key.
Get ready everyone. The more you let government control health care, the more they will control our lives.
How can the left not see this as an issue? You give government more and more control of health care, the following situation is guaranteed:
We'll have another wonderful period where we get a right-wing nutjob as president and a congress full of equally insane nutjobs that want to force everyone to follow their personal vision of morality. They will have control of health care. BOOM. Abortion becomes illegal (or not a preferred option, thus costing over 50K) . Stem cell treatments will be prevented. Heck, some of them would probably want all forms of birth control to be made illegal. Could you imagine GW Bush and his congress having control of health care? How does this NOT scare anyone?
Please note that I am completely against how healthcare works right now. You don't know the cost of the service before you get it, making it ripe for preferential treatment and fraud. Too many people are put into bankruptcy due to health care costs. Something does need to change. The Health Care bill that was passed unfortunately is a disgrace and does nothing to fix the issue of cost. The cost of labor in the US is artificially high due to health care costs and thus makes it even harder for us to recover in a global economy, but the health care bill doesn't address this...during a time of high unemployment.
The day the bill passed, stock prices for various corporations that sell insurance or prescription medicine went up. If you can't see that this was nothing but more corporatism, I have some promising Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers stock to sell you.

Mod Parent Up. This is a very important point. How long does it take to transmit a single packet's worth of electrons onto the wire? How long to get it over even a simple 1m length of fiber/cable? And how many packets are part of a given trade?
It's like measuring down to the thousandths of a mL using a standard graduated cylinder.

I drew the same conclusion. The quants deal with markets in which their decisions can change the landscape of the playing field. In predicting winners of sports games, they have no such influence. It's not an apples to apples comparison. I like your analogy!

Absolutely. Well said. To take this further, last year the Wall Street Journal had an excellent editorial that showed the majority of foreclosure issues were not sub-prime mortgages, but normal, prime mortgages. The real culprit was "zero money down". It appears that the need to spend well outside one's means was not limited to people with bad credit.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124657539489189043.html
I am surprised that these studies haven't been taken further. One would hope that if we were to try and prevent such a crisis from recurring, we would analyze the the actual root cause of the problem and devise a solution for it

How do we mod a comment past +5? I don't usually chuckle out loud at a comment, but this one was genius.

How much evidence is there to show that America closely observed other nations' health care systems and tried to take the best from each in this 2000 page bill? I believe these were the steps taken by South Korea when they started their reform. I read many parts of the bill and I'm still trying to figure out what on earth they have to do with health care, let alone better health care.
I agree that the American system is a disaster, but many are worried we're going to get a large, clunky, bureaucratic health care system that ends up causing more problems than solutions.
The funniest part so far is that many people who have been pushing so hard for nationalized health care are up in arms regarding the abortion amendment. If you give complete power over to the state, the state can do whatever they want and you will have no recourse...other than leaving the country. This is why it's a good idea not to give such power to the state, especially if its Congress is full of crazies from both sides of the spectrum.
Get ready for more nonsense like congress preventing our only health insurance provider (soon to be the government) from allowing any medical treatment that involves stem cells. It could happen. Politics will grow deeper between the doctor and the patient. If this doesn't scare you, I don't know what does.
Again, there has to be some solutions to the American Health Care debacle, but I'm not seeing many good ideas coming from Congress.

Call me old fashioned ... but I think we should worship the sun and moon as powerful gods, and fear them.